The Scottish forces were commanded by the tough David Leslie — no stranger to invading England under the Covenant banner. He was hampered by a Committee of the Kirk. They dogged his every move. Their first action was to purge his army of eighty good officers and more than three thousand experienced soldiers they suspected of loose morals or swearing in public. These valuable troops were replaced with raw recruits — 'nothing but useless clerks and ministers' sons, who have never seen a sword, much less used one'. The committee then accompanied Leslie on his march.
Cromwell had fought alongside Leslie at the battle of Marston Moor and knew he would be a formidable foe. He was in his own territory. Like Ormond in Ireland, he avoided pitched battle, using classic guerrilla tactics. It gave Cromwell's scouts plenty to do, simply trying to find out where enemy pickets were hiding in the undergrowth. Gideon was busy; he almost enjoyed that. It was dangerous, however. By choosing to bring their campaign onto Leslie's own ground, where he knew every tussock on the inhospitable hills, the English had rashly exposed themselves. He stripped bare the country. Men vanished into the hills with their livestock, leaving only women, old men and children. Crops were taken from the fields. The bare hills were bad grazing for horses, so even fodder had to be imported. Meanwhile Leslie made excellent use of his forces, particularly his dragoons, who laid ambushes then melted away, leaving their opponents pointlessly wandering to and fro while their strength and their scant resources dwindled.
As in Ireland, supplies had to come by sea. Cromwell had made meticulous arrangements. Bread and Cheshire cheese were provided for the men. Beans and oats for the horses were ferried in too. The troops carried with them their own horseshoes, nails and portable ovens in order to bake unbreakable marching biscuit. But they lacked tents — only a hundred small ones for officers had been supplied — and as the weather closed in, this would severely hamper them.
Leslie had dug in to protect Edinburgh and its port at Leith; after abortive assaults it became clear that Cromwell's inferior numbers would never prevail there. Throughout August, the Scots skirmished endlessly, while their taunted foes became exhausted and demoralised. The Scots captured a cavalry patrol near Glasgow and sent tortured and mutilated bodies back to Cromwell. Sickness ran rife through the English ranks. In late August, they retreated to Musselburgh on the coast, from where hundreds of sick and wounded men were shipped home. The weather had turned foul and Leslie bothered the remainder mercilessly. They were tired, spent, hungry, apprehensive and harried. Far from home, with his army five thousand down, depleted and sinking, Cromwell retreated to the coast, where he hoped ships could bring supplies or even evacuate the troops.
After more pointless manoeuvring, driving rain and lack of rations drove the English to seek shelter at Dunbar. This could only be a temporary bolt-hole, but Gideon and the other scouts soon discovered the worst. The Scots had arrived ahead of them. They were blocking the route south to Berwick. In this narrow coastal strip, with the lowering sea to one side and the rain-drenched Lammermuir Hills above, they had been boxed in. Leslie marched his main regiments to the top of nearby Doon Hill, from where he dominated their fatal position.
As the rain beat down, Cromwell's men sought whatever shelter they could, in and around the tiny coastal town. Stationed above on a steep escarpment which was protected by a swollen, raging burn, the Scots poised for the kill. If the New Model chose to fight, they would have to charge uphill on precipitous ground, against superior numbers and into a blaze of artillery.
It was a dismal moment. For once, Cromwell had let himself be outmanoeuvred. His men were outnumbered two-to-one and a third of them were already out of action, with illness claiming more daily. The position looked hopeless. Communication with Berwick, the only possible retreat for the cavalry, had been cut. Evacuation of the infantry by sea, under the Scots' guns, would be a murderous exercise. There was no time to do it and they had too few ships in any case. Cromwell managed to send out an urgent dispatch to Sir Arthur Haselrigge, at Newcastle, pleading for reinforcements and urging him to keep the army's predicament a secret from Parliament. But the troops would be done for, long before reinforcements could arrive.
They were in a classic trap. All David Leslie had to do now was to stay where he was and starve them out.
Chapter Sixty-Five — Dunbar: 1650
1. O PRAISE the LORD, all ye nations; praise him, all ye people.
2. For his merciful kindness is great toward us: and the truth of the LORD endureth for ever. Praise ye the LORD.
On the bleak dark night of the 2nd of September 1650, Captain Gideon Jukes of the New Model Army lay on the ground on his belly at the edge of a cornfield, soaked to the skin, believing he would die next day and thinking about life. Life, Gideon believed, should be better than this. He was hungry and freezing. His Monmouth cap was so sodden with rainwater, it had stretched to almost twice its normal size — unwearable, but he diligently kept it on because it was a dark colour and camouflaged his light hair. Corn stubble had prickled his wet skin like six-inch nails, adding to the insect bites that already tormented him. Dunbar lay on a great curve of coastline that angled out, where the Firth of Forth runs into the North Sea, dark and heaving water, often dangerous to fishermen and sailors. The night was wild. Great curtains of gale tore across the town, dragging sheets of vicious rain and hail. Town was hardly the word, to a Londoner: just a line of hunched seaside houses around a small harbour. On the east side, the army camped out on a soggy, quagmired, fifty-year-old golf course. Camped was not strictly accurate either. Most had no tents. The luckier ones who did could not pitch them because the wind was too strong. Many men were too sick and demoralised to care; disease was careering through the ranks by the hour. A few found the energy to cheer themselves up by praying. There was no point trying to sleep. The wailing wind and the battering rain destroyed their rest. Besides, armies generally know when they are on the verge of great endeavour. Especially when there is no hope for them.
Up on the high ground, Gideon could sense the enemy very close by. He was not surprised. It merely confirmed what they had seen happening all day: the Scots had moved down from the summit. The New Model did not know why; it would take the kind of spies they could not use — spies who could go right in among the Scots regiments and overhear what had compelled Leslie to this unnecessary decision when he had had it so easy. Gideon could guess one reason: the misery the English were suffering down on the shore was nothing to the buffeting that the Scottish troops must have endured, when they were exposed to all the elements threw at them, up high on the crest of Doon Hill. Battered to exhaustion, the men must have pleaded for respite.
Gideon would hardly have believed that David Leslie had been forced downhill by the Kirk Committee. But those dough-brained Presbyterian ministers wanted a fast solution. Since their cannon could not reach Cromwell's men from the hill and they wanted to see bombardment, they dumped Leslie's patient tactics. Fairfax and Cromwell had never been so overruled. Fairfax had made sure he was given a completely free hand as soon as the New Model Army was formed and the volatile Cromwell would have beaten up insufferable civilians who interfered.
On Sunday, when Cromwell's men first arrived, Leslie had wanted to attack before they could establish proper defences. Then, the ministers of the Kirk refused to let him fight on the Sabbath. Now that the New Model was properly positioned, Leslie preferred to leave disease and hunger to do his work. But on Monday, the Kirk worthies instructed him to move his men downhill, ready to do battle. After fruitless argument, he gave in. From four o'clock in the afternoon the English had been aware of this enormous army moving closer towards them — the shuffles of men and horses, the groan of wheels under gun carriages. The Scots descended the hill slowly, until they had formed a huge arc, hemming in their opponents against the coast. They were stretched out over almost two miles, intending to leave no exit for escape. That night they settled down in the cornfields along the far side of the Brox Burn; this was where Gideon was reconnoitring after dark. They had no tents at all. He could hear that they were extremely unhappy.
The Brox Burn was normally fordable, but after so much rain it now crashed down its forty-foot-deep chasm in furious torrents until it flowed into the sea. Gideon had just managed to cross at a lower place near the shore, where the banks dropped and the widened water calmed. This place had been discovered earlier in the day, when
